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Open Science is a broad term, covering the many exciting developments in how science is becoming more open, accessible, efficient, democratic, and transparent. This Open Science revolution is being driven by new, digital tools for scientific collaboration, experiments and analysis and which make scientific knowledge more easily accessible by professionals and the general public, anywhere, at any time.[Source: Digital Agenda for Europe]

At the Competitiveness Council of 28-29 May 2015, the European Research ministers agreed on the development of a European Open Science Agenda under the European Research Area. In its conclusions, the Council called for open, data-intensive and networked research and emphasised the importance of developing e-infrastructures.Opening the "Opening up to an era of innovation" conference, the Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas, outlined the plans for Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World: "New knowledge is created through global collaborations involving thousands of people from across the world and from all walks of life".On the same occasion, European Commissioners Günther H. Oettinger and Carlos Moedas published a joint blog post exploring open science, its role in boosting innovation & growth in Europe and the position of the EU. They announced the European Open Science Cloud initiative and the strategy on open data in research.A public consultation on Science 2.0 / open science was held between July and September 2014 to gather the opinions of a broad sample of interested parties from across the EU research landscape. The final report has been published.

Projects for Open Science and Open Access

The European Commission is currently funding projects striving to reach open science and open access to scientific results.OpenAIRE stands for Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, and its mission is to gather the metadata of research output (publications and associated research) funded by the European Commission to enable EU researchers, businesses and citizens to have free and open access to EU-funded research papers. The OpenAIRE portal now includes over 11.5 million open access documents from over 600 data providers. Over 60 new data providers (repositories and journal aggregators) joined this year and over 50 revalidated.Another project supporting open access is RECODE that has leveraged existing networks, communities and projects to address challenges within the open access and data dissemination and preservation sector. On the basis of this work, RECODE has presented policy recommendations on open access to research dataThe European project OpenScienceLink pushes towards publishing, sharing and reviewing research results. OpenScienceLink introduced a holistic approach to the publication, sharing, linking, review and evaluation of research results, based on the open access to scientific information. The project also focused on best practices associated with the establishment and use of openly accessible repositories of scientific information.

Citizen science

Citizen science is a broad term, covering that part of Open Science in which citizens can participate in the scientific research process in different possible ways: as observers, as funders, in identifying images or analysing data, or providing data themselves. This allows for the democratisation of science, and is also linked to stakeholders' engagement and public participation. Read the blog post "Science to the people!".

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